My idea was to mimic a famous TV commercial advertizing Old Gold Cigarettes. The commercial featured a tap dancer hidden inside a pack of cigarettes with only her legs showing, wearing a pair of white cowboy boots with tassels. At the end of the dance she curtsied slightly and stuck a cigarette out of the top of the pack. After hours of painting and lettering I presented myself to the judges. I was disappointed; even more so when I overheard one of the judges commenting afterward, “I would have voted for him, but I thought he was a girl.” I suppose the judging was about how far you defied your natural category. I guess a real witch couldn’t have won the “dressed as a witch” prize.I didn’t enter the city-wide Halloween parade contest because the only category I could think of was “boys dressed as girls”. (They really had that in those pre-homo-hysterical years). I didn’t think of myself as a boy dressed as a girl, but as a boy dressed as a pack of cigarettes. Besides, I had dressed as a girl the year before and I just looked like a girl. It was my second disappointment of the season.Mere days before, I had lost another contest. It was the beginning of the sports season for eighth graders at our country school. Boys were recruited for basketball, which was the sport of the era for young teens. I was terrible at basketball, or anything with balls. But I certainly wanted to be included in the autumnal madness. So I decided on the spur of the moment to try out for the cheerleading squad. All my closest friends were doing that. Why not? So I got some of the girls to coach me on the steps and cheers of “Gimme a J!” and “One, two, three, four, who’we gonna cheer for?” Pep and a loud voice were what counted. The cheerleading squad had 5 members, just like the basketball team. 9 of us showed our stuff and then the class voted, very democratically. Clearly 4 of the girls were best. But the general opinion was that I was number 5. Still, when the announcement came out, I had lost. Then I was told that our principal had vetoed my selection. I was crushed. Before I could get too far in my misery, however, the coach, our classroom teacher, called me aside and said he wanted me to work with him as the team manager. Handling the balls, equipment and uniforms…well it was part of the team. I’d be on the bus for the “away” games, not stuck in a study hall. I also kept the record book during the game and ran the all-important time clock and buzzer. It seemed to me that probably the principal had vetoed me. But he liked me. I didn’t doubt that. Years later I decided that maybe he just wanted to spare me the fate of being the first and only boy cheerleader in Morgan County and maybe the whole State of Illinois.That summer I also entered the County Fair. All we 4-H kids did. It didn’t occur to me to worry that the boys were showing their swine and beef, macho products, while I was displaying a chocolate cake. I got a third place ribbon for it, too. Some of the champion cake bakers grumbled when they found out they had been beaten by a boy, one decades younger than them.If thirteen was a good age to know the score, and October was a good month for “coming out” (as it supposedly is nowadays), I missed the chance. I did not add up all my cross dressing and preferences until I was the age of the cake bakers I had such fun beating. In those days Halloween was just a day to dress up and get free candy. Gay and lesbian Americans had not yet taken it over as a “high holiday” for showing off without coming out.Well, in that, I was ahead of the times.

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On Halloween, one year ago, a friend helped me set-up this website as a bulletin board to display Ken Dobson’s Queer Ruminations from Thailand. The main items have been a weekly column and a stash of longer articles on “Thai culture, Buddhism and Christianity as they impact life for LGBTIQ people living in Thailand.” The weekly blog has turned out to be a string of essays in a journal format chronicling whatever idea of the week seemed worth mentioning.

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In the beginning we averaged about 200 “hits” a month. Over the year we have increased to more than 1000 visitors to the website each month. But there have been no comments, messages or e-mails. Not a single “like” in the last ten months, even though the automatic counter tells us our visitors are steadily increasing.Click “like” or leave a comment below if you would like this website to continue for a second year.

We assume some visitors actually read the blogs when they visit the site. But just this once I would like to hear from you so we can decide whether to go on to year 2 or not.

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Just in case you haven’t heard, this is the week to go to the theater. The Gate Theater Group is presenting a play we should not miss: “The Laramie Project” by Moises Kaufman, on Thursday to Sunday, October 17, 18 and 19 at 7 p.m. and October 20 at 2 p.m. at the Kad Suan Kaew, 7th floor theater. The suggested donation is 270 baht, but we’ll be generous, of course. For more information and pictures click on www.gate-theater.com“The Laramie Project” is based on interviews made in Laramie, Wyoming on November 14, 1998 after 21 year-old gay Matthew Shepherd was tied to a fence on October 6 and so brutally beaten by Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney that he died on October 12. Since then Matthew Shepherd has become an icon and banner example of brutality against gay people. Matthew’s mother’s campaign against hate crimes led to many changes in US federal and state laws.

The powerful drama was first presented in New York City. See the story, beginning with an article online at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Laramie_Project and to see the made for TV production click on www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1qiTmF0p4A or just type in “The Laramie Project” on Google for these and other listings. The drama has taken on a life of its own, being a magnet for strong emotions and sometimes homophobic reactions, as was the recent case when the University of Mississippi production of “The Laramie Project” was interrupted by the Ol’Miss football squad a month ago.

Here in town the drama is being enacted by about 30 local residents who are part of The Gate Theater Group, directed by Stephan Turner, a Chicago educated, New York experienced theater professional who prefers to live the better life here in Chiang Mai. Amateur and volunteer groups like The Gate Theater Group (and I cannot refrain from mentioning the Chiang Mai Youth Symphony Orchestra) are part of the reason life here in Chiang Mai is better.

I confess that I have not always been precise. Sometimes I have used the term gender orientation when I meant sexual orientation and failed to use the right term when I meant gender expression.In 2003, a full ten years ago, Virginia Mollenkott wrote a book, perhaps ahead of its time, entitled Omnigender: a trans-religious approach. Following her taxonomy I want to put this down in black and white:Sexual Orientation There are at least seven: heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, autoerotic, asexual, pansexual, and pedophiliac (Mollenkott, p. 70), “with many more if we were to include fetishes.” These terms describe patterns in the narratives of people about their yearnings, preferences, satisfactions, activities (and the psychological results of those activities), hopes, etc. “Sexual orientation is an enduring personal quality that inclines people to feel romantic or sexual attraction” says the Wikipedia article on sexual orientation. Some scholars use the term “sexual preference” but that suggests an amount of choice which other scholars deny. Kinsey avoided the whole idea of attraction or preference and just investigated actions and experiences as being more reliable indicators. Gender Identity It is the “core feeling of maleness, femaleness or otherwise.” Mollenkott offers the opinion that “most lesbians, gay males, and bisexuals feel comfortable identifying with their birth gender, although there will be degrees of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ in their gender expression” (Mollenkott, p. 71). I haven’t the statistics to quibble about the word “most”, but I want to assert that there are katoeys in this country who are quite sure they are females in male bodies and are not at all comfortable with the bodies they were born with.Gender Expression The way people present themselves, most of the time or just some of the time, at that time is their gender expression. It tends to be male, female or androgynous. It can change as occasions arise. It can be quite exaggerated as well, suggesting that ironically the opposite is actually true, or it can be understated and a little vague. On the whole it takes several female gender indicators to overcome a major male indicator.Mollenkott avoids gossipy talk about who does what to whom and how. Slang tends to slide these insinuations into such distinctions as “kings and queens”, “tops and bottoms”, and the Thai favorite “man and gay” which are the same as the first two pairs. In any case, Mollenkott was making a case for doing away with the binary theory, which is rigid in the religious sectors which she was addressing. She coined or used the non-pejorative term “omnigender” whereas we are now rehabilitating the word “queer”.The Kinsey scale of heterosexual to homosexual, 0 to 6, was flawed because it had no place to list those who only want to have solo sex with themselves, those who genuinely never want to have sex, those who are eager for sex outside the human race (with sheep or watermelons, for example), and those who can only be sexually aroused by the notion of sex with or between children. Kinsey also missed those who have transformed from one physical sex to another to conform to their true identities.